Fabian Pascal is back and Debunking again

This book takes pride of place on my bookshelf. Highly recommended reading for anyone in the database industry.

If you haven’t seen Fabian Pascal’s blog before, it’s because he’s only just started it – but he’ll be publishing new material, as well as articles previously published at Database Debunkings, infamous for his fundamental, no-holds-barred, uncompromising take on what the Relational Model is, what it isn’t, and what that means for all professionals who design databases.

It was with sadness that I saw the site go relatively static over the past years, and to see it being revived is a fresh blast of cool air in a world that continues to be inundated by fads and misconceptions. Of particular note was the “THE VOCIFEROUS IGNORANCE HALL OF SHAME“… I’m looking forward to seeing the old vigorous debates that will no doubt be revived or rehashed.

The pure view of the Relational model of data is, perhaps, too idealistic for some – impractical for day-to-day use in a SQL-dominated world. Personally, I’ve found (although I cannot pretend to be an expert, in any sense, on this topic) that starting from a fundamentally pure model, unconstrained by physical limitations, conceived at an almost ideal, Platonic level, allows me to discover the simplest, most provably “correct” solution for any data modelling problem. At some stage I have to then “downgrade” it to a form that is convenient and pragmatic for implementation in a SQL database like Oracle; in spite of this, having that logical design in the back of my head helps to highlight potential inconsistencies or data integrity problems that must then be handled by the application.

That this situation is, in fact, not the best of all possible worlds, is something that we can all learn and learn again. Have a look, and see what you think: dbdebunk.blogspot.com.au.